Judging Historical Figures

Is it right or fair to dishonour somebody from earlier eras based on today’s criteria of right and wrong? We’re used to that happening to political figures, but I didn’t realize it’s been happening in other non-political areas (science, philosophy, and ideologies) as well until I read Sean Welsh’s article.

 

Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, did a lot of data crunching of family trees and thereby strengthened the belief in the role of genetics. Inevitably, the data led him to being a supporter of eugenics, both selective breeding (positive eugenics) as well as discouraging the breeding of those with undesirable characteristics (negative eugenics). Given what followed next (Nazism, forced sterilizations in the US etc), perhaps you think it isn’t wrong that Galton’s name is being removed from several institutions in recent times? Wrong, says Welsh:

“(Because you’re tarring) Galton with the Nazi brush even though he died 32 years before Hitler came to power.”

Besides, isn’t prenatal screening done even today? To identify foetuses with horrific diseases, giving the parents (and the unborn child) a chance to be spared untold pain and suffering later…

 

Also, as Welsh reminds us, we can’t even cite the language used by the likes of Galton as evidence of a certain mindset:

“Today we speak of “children with special needs” rather than imbeciles, idiots, and mental defectives. However, I do not see how we can fairly criticise men of the past for using the language of their time rather than the more sensitive language of today.”

 

Is it fair to condemn “great men of the past (e.g., Linnaeus, Kant, and Voltaire)” as racists and white supremacists? Is it fair to call Darwin “racist and sexist”? Weren’t their views “neither atypical or extreme for his time”? How about Abraham Lincoln? Sure, he fought against slavery, but “he also opposed black voters and jurors on racist grounds”. So should we revile the man?

 

If we truly go down the road of impact of beliefs (the way we do with eugenics = Nazism), how come Karl Marx’s statues aren’t being torn down? Didn’t his work have “policy implications for social engineering and led to millions of deaths in Stalin’s gulags, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and Pol Pot’s Killing Fields”?

 

Welsh clarifies that he isn’t saying nobody in history can be vilified. If there’s a direct chain to the effects (e.g. from Stalin to gulags; Hitler to the concentration camps), by all means, let’s revile them. But those guys cannot be put at par with the men who just subscribed to the beliefs of their times, or prescribed a policy that was implemented decades or centuries later leading to horrific outcomes.

 

All of which is why Welsh says:

“Instead of airbrushing history into good guys and bad guys, when it comes to intellectual giants, we should learn to take the rough with the smooth.”

Let’s apply the same maturity of how we view the ancient Greeks:

“Aristotle was a xenophobic and sexist defender of slavery. He also invented logic, biology, and what moderns call virtue ethics. We remember him for the latter not the former.”

And keep reminding ourselves that:

“The intellectual giants on whose shoulders we stand may be ogres on some moral points by modern standards. Even so, they helped us get science to where it is today. Their positive achievements should be honoured. If their normative failings were typical of their age, we should cut them a little slack. They were people of their time not ours.”

 

The title of Welsh’s article is perfect: “Standing on the Shoulders of Ogres”.